Feds retreat from demand for info on Trump inaugural protest website

Federal prosecutors have dramatically narrowed their legal demands for information about a website used to organize protests of President Donald Trump's inauguration.

The move follows complaints from privacy advocates and civil liberties groups that a search warrant a D.C. Superior Court judge issued last month for data about the disruptJ20.org website was wildly overbroad and could have swept up data on thousands of people who simply visited web pages about anti-inaugural activities.

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In a new court filing Tuesday, lawyers from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia said "factual revelations" led them to drop a demand for visitor logs and to limit the government's demand for other data to July 2016 through Inauguration Day.

"Over the past week, DreamHost has made numerous public statements and made many statements in its opposition brief which provide information about the website that were unknown to the government and the Court at the time that the Warrant was issued," Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jennifer Kerkhoff and John Borchert wrote. "The government could not exclude from the scope of the Warrant what it did not know existed."

In a motion it filed objecting to the search warrant, DreamHost said the original demand appeared to cover 1.3 million IP addresses relating to visits to the disruptj20 site from Jan. 23 to Jan. 28.

After the company cited that figure in a court filing on Aug. 16, Borchert asked the webhosting firm how many such visits there were before Jan. 21. A lawyer for the firm declined to share that information with the government, emails show.

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In the new filing, prosecutors say they are trying to investigate violence and property damage that took place on Jan. 20 as part of a "riot" just prior to Trump's inauguration. The prosecution insists it is not trying to chill the activities of law-abiding demonstrators.

"The government values and respects the First Amendment right of all Americans to participate in peaceful political protests and to read protected political expression online," Kerkhoff and Borchert wrote. "This Warrant has nothing to do with that right. The Warrant is focused on evidence of the planning, coordination and participation in a criminal act - that is, a premeditated riot. The First Amendment does not protect violent, criminal conduct such as this."

D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Robert Morin is scheduled to hold a hearing on the dispute Thursday morning.

A lawyer for DreamHost, Raymond Aghaian, welcomed the concessions from prosecutors, but said the firm plans to continue to fight the warrant.

"The government has now withdrawn entirely its unlawful and highly problematic request for any data relating to the visitors of the website and any unpublished data subject to the Privacy Protection Act," Aghaian told POLITICO via email. "This is a tremendous win for DreamHost, its users and the public. There remains, unfortunately, other privacy and First and Fourth Amendment issues with the search warrant, which we will address in a separate filing and at the hearing."